Best Of

Well, I understand your complaints, however there are newer plugins available to deal with spam , not just the botstop now you can track and ban ip addresses and such . Spam is not something that only happens in this software forums. It happens in blogs and any form they can fill. And determined people.

The new version for Vanilla will be coming out soon it is over 78% finished . It will have many improved functions and modernizations .

But as a smaller non-commercial community are we destined to suffer with inferior software?

The software is not inferior and people are not suffering lol , on the other hand it is superior to any free software for the same purpose. That is why people are shifting in droves to use it. Anything else is old and stale and has reached it's peak all they have left is to copy this software.

We are grateful we even have this option. At least I am. I certainly could not write it for myself , however the framework allows for growing your own plugins and themes and add what you need. It's flexibility is it's greatest strength .

It is really up to those who embrace this open source version to take it as far as they can . Not up to the community which are made up of volunteers and users like you to provide forced support. This is a community to help each other. It is a great community of very clever and intelligent and capable coders and designers who chose to help out those in distress. Or to give tips . Everyone gets what they came in for in the end.

@vrijvlinder

I went and found that newer plugin for dealing with spam. Works great so far! One problem solved. Thanks for that.

As for inferior software, I was referring to every other non-Vanilla web forum.

You should use https://success.vanillaforums.com/kb/developers . It must be the redirect is down. I’ll alert the team.

I can think of about a dozen valid criticisms of Vanilla off the top of my head, several of them security-related. As someone moving away from Vanilla, I have no horses left in this race. But for real: If you're gonna claim there's a problem here, at least do absolutely minimal work of explaining what the problem actually is and why it's different from other owner abilities (like direct database access, or the ability to reset passwords or change email addresses of users). Like... at least think it through before speaking and putting the onus on someone else to explain all the ways you simply haven't.

Even the framing of their "reputation is now questionable" implies this is some new feature and not something that literally shipped alongside the very first release 13 years ago. It's not on by default, so the owner (who has access to do literally anything they want to misrepresent data in any way you can imagine) has chosen to allow select folks to spoof. Would I do that on my community? No. But it's a valid feature if someone has that use case and it's not an inherent security threat for existing.